A tiny Pacific island nation has shown more hospitality to detainees than the US or EU, writes DENIS STAUNTON
THE TINY Pacific island nation of Palau was unknown to most Americans until this week, when the tourist paradise agreed to accept up to 13 Chinese Muslims from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
Palau’s president Johnson Toribiong said the decision to offer a home to the men was an expression of traditional hospitality but he acknowledged that it coincided with a $200 million development aid grant from the United States.
The former detainees will, in theory, be free to leave the eight islands that make up Palau any time they choose. In practice, however, they are going nowhere because, as Toribiong pointed out, all their passports are either lost or out of date.
The Pentagon has long admitted that the Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, who were captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, were not enemy combatants but opposition from China. This complicated earlier attempts to resettle them. Beijing wants the men to be returned to China, where they could face prosecution and imprisonment for separatist activities.
Four other Uighurs arrived in Bermuda this week, prompting a terse statement from Britain’s foreign office, questioning whether the British overseas territory was entitled to accept the men without consulting London.
“We have underlined to the Bermuda government that it should have consulted the UK on whether this falls within their competence, or is a foreign affairs or security issue for which the Bermuda government do not have delegated responsibility,” a foreign office spokesman said.
One of the former detainees, Abdul Nasser, thanked the people of Bermuda in a statement issued through his lawyer.
“Growing up under communism, we always dreamed of living in peace and working in free society like this one,” he said. “Today you have let freedom ring.”
Barack Obama promised to let freedom ring for many of the Guantánamo detainees when he announced that the detention camp would be closed by January 2010. Initially, the administration hoped to resettle the Uighurs in Northern Virginia, which already has a small Chinese Muslim community.
Resistance from Democrats and Republicans in Congress forced the White House to back down, however, and officials indicated this week that no Guantánamo detainees will be allowed to settle in the US.
American reluctance to resettle detainees on its own territory has slowed down Washington’s efforts to persuade other countries to accept up to 70 prisoners the Pentagon has judged fit for release.
Next Monday, EU foreign ministers are expected to agree conditions for the transfer of detainees to Europe but some EU governments have told Washington that it will be hard to explain to European citizens why they should accept prisoners the US rejects. “The primary responsibility for closing Guantánamo and finding residence for former detainees rests with the United States,” said foreign ministers’ statement.
Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, was returned to Chad this week after seven years of detention without charge. El-Gharani was just 14 when he was picked up during a raid on a mosque in Pakistan and sold to US military authorities in Afghanistan for a bounty.
He says he was regularly beaten and tortured during his detention, suspended by the wrists 30 times and subjected to prolonged periods of sleep deprivation. One of at least 22 juveniles held at Guantánamo, El-Gharani was treated no differently from the prison’s adult population, in contravention of a UN protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Last January, US District Court Judge Richard Leon ordered El-Gharani’s release, pouring scorn on the US government’s allegations against him, which included the claim that he had been a member of an al-Qaeda cell in London at a time when he would have been just 11 years old.
Officials in Washington hope that more Guantánamo detainees will be resettled abroad within the next few weeks but most will remain in the detention centre, pending trial in US federal courts or before military tribunals. Obama said last month that a small number who cannot be prosecuted but are deemed too dangerous to be freed, could face indefinite, preventive detention without trial.
The latest moves in Guantánamo follow the death at the detention centre last week of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, a 31-year-old Yemeni captive. Military authorities said the prisoner, who had been subjected to force-feeding through a tube inserted in his nose following a number of hunger strikes, “died of an apparent suicide”.